Quotes About Productivity

The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.

When he ran a review of his team's Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.

There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc'ing everybody, like 'Look at all the work I'm doing.' It's annoying

This same trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible—consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.

As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.

As a 2018 article from the MIT Sloan Management Review explains: "The 'keep everybody busy' theory remains alive and well . . . in knowledge work."39 (The article elaborates that the manufacturing sector, by contrast, figured out in the 1980s that relentless busyness was not an optimal way to run things.)

The 4 Disciplines of Execution,

You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.

the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you're going to go deep.

1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive.

Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill,

In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, "Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?," Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.

You can't, in other words, build a billion dollar empire like Facebook if you're wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.

this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy.

the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.

waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.

wherever they popped up. If my kids were taking a good nap, I'd grab my laptop and lock myself in the home office. If my wife wanted to visit her parents in nearby Annapolis on a weekend day, I'd take advantage of the extra child care to disappear to a quiet corner of their house to write.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.